Shahin said that the head of the al-Dustur (Constitution) Party, Muhammad Elbaradei, would put forward the suggestions of Rebellion to the interim president. They said that the constitutional declaration would in any case lapse as soon as a new constitution is drafted. Elbaradei, advisor to Mansour on foreign affairs, and Hazem Biblawi, the interim prime minister, will head up a commission charged with suggesting amendments to the 2012 constitution.

Shahin said that the real struggle is over the constitution, since the only forces guaranteeing the values of the revolution are the revolutionary street and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the poor and a life of dignity and an independent country.

He warned that rumors had reached Rebellion that the Muslim Brotherhood was mounting a conspiracy aimed at provoking more massacres on Friday, in order to create solidarity among the youth of the Brotherhood and to convince the public that the Brotherhood is being unfairly attacked during the holy fasting month of Ramadan.

Rebellion is calling for the masses to gather in and around Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo to break the fast at sunset and then to pray supereregatory prayers together that night in Tahrir and to raise the flag of Egypt in order to complete the revolution and to protect it from the Muslim Brotherhood and the United States and Israel . . .

The same call was put out in Port Said for people to continue to occupy the city’s central square and to come out to support the overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood leader and former Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi. The leader of the Egypt Party in the city complained that the Brotherhood regime had had a plan to isolate the Suez Canal port from the rest of the country. He also denounced an attack on a church in Port Said, saying that since its founding in the 19th century the city had been characterized by religious tolerance.

6 Responses

I am looking at the live fed from Egypt’s different cities, and i have to say that you have to be extremely committed to flood the streets and gather in squares and places in enormous numbers during the day in Ramadhan with a 90F temperature. That is not easy to do. I can’t go an hour without drinking something or easting something. These folks are protesting out there like it’s nothing.

If they can do that while fasting, well they are not going to go anywhere.

Too bad greed, arrogance, ignorance, tribalism, dominionism, and all those other “forces” at work in the human-operated part of the world seem to be only a set of positive-feedback, divergent, asymptotic functions that only trend toward sustainability and stability in the propaganda of those who apologize for the current overriding actual religion (going by behaviors and outcomes) that might best be called “MOREism.” More for me and my little segment or tribe, less for you Others. An enormous, complex negative-sum game, albeit carefully masked as a zero-sum, with a few interim “winners,”.

Too bad there does not seem to be a “strange attractor,” link to en.wikipedia.org, a kind of species-wide homeostasis, link to en.wikipedia.org, and link to people.scs.carleton.ca, in the matrix we breathe and excrete and combust and otherwise consume and grasp in, that moves all the seeming and maybe actual random, fractal silliness and horror, and occasional little domains of “goodness,” toward a meta-stable state.

And given how we are individually created, and how, on the evidence, we mostly tend to behave, it’s not surprising that way too many of us operate on the notion enunciated by one of the Wall Street Vampire Squids: “Hey, everybody else is cheating and stealing and getting away with it, so I’d be a dope to do anything else, wouldn’t I? Besides, by the time the sh__ really hits the fan, I’ll be gone and you’ll be gone anyway.”

Ain’t seemingly but one way for things to go from here, and despite the magical faith in magical technology or iChange to “iNnovate” something to bring us back from the brink, I hope we will all at least get to enjoy the wind-in-our-hair sensation of free-falling, before we hit the rocks…

Remember when Donald Rumsfeld replied to stories about the looting of museums in Iraq by saying, “Freedom is messy?” That was stupid. Looting museums has nothing to do with negotiating a democratic political order.

What we’re seeing in Egypt is what messy freedom looks like. This long after the American Revolution began, young men were still blasting holes in each other across fields. We didn’t get a functional constitution in place for twelve years, and some pretty ugly things happened in between.

What a comforting impasto to lay over and obscure the image of “Guernica,” or maybe “The Scream,” that “freedom is messy,” and somehow will ineluctably lead to what, again? “Mature democracy?” Like our own? like Britain? like even Canada? like Israel?

There really are reasons why people of good will and good sense reject the version of econopolitics, that we call “democracy” and decline to define accurately, that “our” government is invested in, along with “our” corporations, and intent on slathering the world with…

Sooraya

I fear that this is not going to end well. I have a great deal of admiration for those who protested against Morsi, particularly my comrades in the revolutionary left, but it has become clear – even the NY Times reporting concedes – that elements formerly loyal to Mubarak within the military, law enforcement, bureaucracy, and private sector expropriated the rebellion.

The role that the United States and Gulf States played is not yet clear, but it seems that the former gave a “green light” to the generals, albeit with serious reservations, and the latter have committed billions of dollars in aid.

The grave error that Egyptians made was allowing all those who collaborated with and profited from Mubarak’s reign to remain in positions of power. (It also does not help the the secular forces are fractured and incompetent – the Brotherhood has won the six elections since Mubarak was removed from power.)

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